The Russian Jerusalem (14 page)

A publishing house.

A fine poet and a courageous explorer of Africa. He was in love for many years with Anna Akhmatova and married her in 1910. They had one son, Lev. Soon after their honeymoon he became openly unfaithful. Together with Osip Mandelstam and Akhmatova, he was part of a new movement of poetry which they called ‘Acmeism', which stressed the importance of precision and rejected the mists of Symbolism. Akhmatova left her husband to live with the noted Babylonian scholar Vladimir Shileiko and she and Gumilyov divorced. Never a supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, Gumilyov was not involved in any plot against it. Nevertheless, he was arrested in August 1921 and executed in the same year. He was the first poet to die at the hands of the Revolution.

A writer who lived for a time in Paris and Switzerland but returned to Moscow, she is best known for her remarkable diary of life during the Great Siege of Leningrad, where she remained throughout almost three years.

Jabotinsky was born into an Odessa Jewish family. He became a fervent Zionist after the 1903 massacre of Jews in Kishinyov. A brilliant linguist, writer and orator, he wrote poems and novels even as he worked to convince the Diaspora to leave for Palestine. He was also the inspiration for Irgun, the terrorist arm of the Jewish Resistance movement in the 1940s.

A dominant figure in the Russian provisional government set up by the February Revolution of 1917. This was overthrown by Lenin in the October Revolution of the same year.

Agricultural workers on collective farms.

Khrushchev became the First Secretary of the Communist Party after the power struggle following Stalin's death. Seemingly a loyal supporter of Stalin while the dictator lived, it was Khrushchev who shocked the delegates to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 with an account of Stalin's crimes. When ousted from power in 1964, he was allowed to live quietly until his death, albeit under KGB surveillance.

Born into an educated family in Simbirsk on the Volga, he excelled at school, though he was expelled from university for his radical views, and his brother was executed for them. He spent many years in exile in Western Europe, but returned in 1917 and was the mastermind behind the October Revolution. In 1918, he survived an assassination attempt. In power, Lenin was ruthless but pragmatic, and introduced a measure of private enterprise to supplement the failing Marxist economy. He was uncertain about the wisdom of allowing Stalin to gain power. He died in 1924.

The popular name for the headquarters of the KGB prison on Lubianka Square in Moscow. This was built in 1898 for an insurance company but in Soviet times was a prison where gruesome tortures were practised daily.

A Yiddish word, literally meaning ‘men of air' used to describe men who live on their wits.

A Russian poet generally regarded as one of the greatest voices of the twentieth century. He was born in Warsaw into the family of a wealthy Jewish leather merchant and grew up in St Petersburg, where he attended the prestigious Tenishev School. For a time he studied at St Petersburg University, though he did not graduate. He won fame in 1913 with the publication of
Kamen
(‘Stone') and, alongside his close friends Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov, was one of the founding members of the Acmeist movement. He approved of the February Revolution in 1917 which established the Provisional Government, but was alarmed when the Bolsheviks seized power. He spent much of the subsequent Civil War in Southern Russia. In 1922, he married Nadezhda Iakolevna Khazin. As the Soviet authorities became suspicious of his loyalties, he began to find it hard to publish poetry and turned to prose. No poems were published between 1925 and 1930. His
Journey to Armenia
is the last major work published in his lifetime. He was arrested for the first time in 1934, after writing an epigram about Stalin. It was at this time that Stalin made a telephone call to Boris Pasternak to ask for his assessment of Mandelstam's genius. Pasternak hesitated. Mandelstam was exiled to Cherdyn in the Urals, where he attempted suicide. His sentence was commuted to exile in Voronezh, but in May 1938 he was arrested again and charged with counter-revolutionary activities. This time he was
sentenced to five years. He died in a camp near Vladivostock on 27 December 1938. In 1970, his wife Nadezhda published memoirs of their life together which found an international audience.

A theatre in St Petersburg which is one of the best opera houses in the world and the home of the Kirov Ballet Company.

Both his parents were Prussian citizens. At the age of twenty-one, Meyerhold converted from Lutheranism to the Russian Orthodox Church. A great theatrical innovator, he worked for the Moscow Arts Theatre, and made a decisive break with realism.

A Jewish actor who played roles as diverse as Tevye the Milkman and King Lear. In 1920, he set up the Moscow State Jewish Theatre, which performed many Yiddish classics. During the Second World War, as a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, he travelled to the United States to raise money for the Soviet cause. His horror at Nazi atrocities made him keen to see Ehrenburg's
Black Book of Soviet Jewry
published in Russia, and he was sympathetic to the State of Israel. He died in a car accident arranged by the KGB in 1948.

A poor district of Odessa, once filled with colourful gangsters.

Yunna Moritz was born in Kiev. Her father, Pinchas Moritz, was imprisoned under Stalin. She spent the Second World War in the Urals, and became prominent as a poet as part of the sixties generation alongside Yevtushenko. Aside from the popularity of
her own poems, she is the translator of Constantine Cavafy and Federico García Lorca. She lives in Moscow.

A celebrated Russian composer who included a musical impression of a conversation between two Jews in his
Pictures from an Exhibition
.

A poet, novelist, critic and translator, Anatoly Naiman has held Fellowships at both Harvard and Oxford, and has written significant memoirs of Anna Akhmatova. E.F. interviewed him when she was writing her own biography of Akhmatova. He lives in Moscow.

An élite of Communist Party members, often bureaucrats, who enjoyed special privileges.

Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow into the Jewish family of a distinguished painter, Leonid Pasternak, and a gifted pianist, Rosa Kauffman. At first, he was attracted to a career as a composer but decided instead to go to the University of Marburg to study Philosophy. During the First World War, fired by a love affair, he wrote a sequence of poems,
My Sister Life
, which inspired a whole generation of poets, including Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. At first, he was optimistic about the idealism of the Bolshevik Revolution, though not the Soviet insistence on Socialist Realism. He began a fervent correspondence with the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva, then in exile, after reading her sequence of lyrics from
Poem of the End
. Through his father, he was able to bring the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke into their correspondence. By the late 1920s, he found it hard to publish his own poetry in Russia and turned to prose, notably
Safe Conduct
.
A visit to the Ukraine, during which he witnessed the horrors of forced collectivisation, brought on a nervous breakdown. During the great purges of the 1930s, he began to work on the translation of Shakespeare's plays, which became immensely popular. Even Stalin admired his poetry, and was said to have crossed his name off a list of those to be arrested, saying: ‘Leave this cloud dweller alone.' It was under Khrushchev in 1958 that Pasternak allowed his novel
Dr Zhivago
to be published in Italy by the Feltrinelli publishing house. It brought him worldwide fame. A year later, he was named as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. As his poetry was cited rather than his novel, he at first accepted joyfully, and then was brought to refuse. The Party, incensed at his disloyalty, demanded he should be sent into exile, but the sentence was revoked. He died of cancer in 1960.

Leonid Pasternak was born into a Jewish family in Odessa and became a celebrated Russian painter, particularly noted for his portraits: Lev Tolstoy and Rainer Maria Rilke both sat for him. His wife, Rosalie Kauffman, was a musical prodigy. He was the father of three daughters, who left Russia with him for Berlin in 1921, and two sons, who remained in Russia. One of his sons was the great poet Boris Pasternak.

A village a few miles outside Moscow where the Writers' Union allocated dachas of different sizes to significant writers.

His
Tale of the Unextinguished Moon
(1926) aroused criticism when it appeared; the magazine which included it was immediately banned. Since he drew a sympathetic portrait of a supporter of Leon Trotsky in his novel
Mahogany
, and allowed the book to be published abroad, the book was refused publication in the Soviet
Union. He continued to write, however, until in 1937 he disappeared. It is assumed he was arrested by the NKVD and executed.

A Hebrew word meaning compassion, which entered Yiddish speech.

An outstanding scholar, translator and biblical commentator who lived in France in the Middle Ages.

The central figure in Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment
. He is a poor student who murders an old pawnbroker and is led by the cleverness of Inspector Porfiry to betray his own guilt.

A distinguished Russian poet, winner of the prestigious Pushkin Prize, he was a friend of Akhmatova and also of Brodsky. They were both dubbed ‘Akhmatova's Orphans' when she died.

An important Soviet spy, who defected to the West and was assassinated in Lausanne on the orders of Yezhov in 1937.

One of the greatest poets in the German language, Rilke was born in Prague. In 1895, he made a trip to Russia, where he met Tolstoy and the Russian painter Leonid Pasternak (the father of the poet Boris Pasternak). It was through his father that Boris Pasternak made epistolary contact with a poet he revered. Marina Tsvetaeva, with whom Boris was also in correspondence, eagerly joined in an exchange of letters with Rilke during the last months of his life.

Long, embroidered towels.

A leading Decembrist poet, Ryleev was executed at the command of Nicholas I. He was a friend of Alexander Pushkin.

A ‘man of all work' connected to a synagogue, with a role somewhere between that of a beadle and a caretaker.

Born into a cobbler's family in Gory, Georgia, Stalin was educated at a theological seminary. He was an early worker for the Revolution, though he did not have a central position in 1917. He was appointed General Secretary of the Party in 1922, and by the end of the 1920s had outmanoeuvred all his rivals. His enforced collectivisation of agriculture cost millions of lives, and in the 1930s he organised the Great Terror, supposedly designed to rid the Party of its enemies. He concluded a pact with Hitler in 1939 and was ill-prepared for Hitler's invasion. Nevertheless, his ruthless indifference to human losses led his country to victory and after the Second World War his empire extended over most of Eastern Europe. In the last years of his life, he became increasingly paranoid. He died in 1953.

A political and literary historian, who emigrated to Great Britain in 1921, renouncing his title of Prince. While teaching Russian Literature at the University of London, he wrote a
History of Russian Literature from its Beginnings
which remains a standard textbook. He returned to the Soviet Union in the thirties as a convinced Marxist. He was arrested in Moscow in 1937 and died in a camp in the Gulag in 1939.

A Moscow theatre with a small auditorium where in Soviet times the seats were reserved for Union members or Western visitors.

Prayer shawls.

A school in St Petersburg famous for its Western, liberal ideals. Many important writers, such as Vladimir Nabokov, attended.

One of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, and arguably the most original. Born in Moscow into the family of Ivan Tsvetsaev, Professor of Fine Arts at Moscow University, she grew up in material comfort. Her childhood, however, was dominated by the ferocious puritanism of her mother Maria, who had married a much older widower only because her father refused to let her marry the man she loved. Denied a career as a concert pianist herself, Maria forced her elder daughter to spend hours at the piano every day from the age of six. Maria had tuberculosis and died when Marina was fourteen; her daughter then abandoned the study of the piano and began to write poetry. She said: ‘After a mother like that, I had only one alternative: to become a poet.' By the age of eighteen, Tsvetaeva already had a reputation as a poet and could number the poet Maximilian Voloshin among her friends. It was at Voloshin's dacha in the Crimea that she met Sergei Efron. They married in 1912 and before war broke out in 1914 they had two children, and were inordinately happy. Tsvetaeva was not faithful to Efron, however: she had a brief love affair with Osip Mandelstam and a longer and more intense relationship with the lesbian poet Sofia Parnok. In the Civil War, Efron went south to fight for the White Army; Tsvetaeva remained in Moscow coping with two young children through the Moscow famine. She was particularly close
to her precocious elder daughter Ariadne (Alya). When the situation was at its most desperate, Tsvetaeva put her younger daughter Irina into an orphanage, where the child died of malnutrition in 1919. After the Civil War ended in victory for the Bolsheviks in 1922, Efron fled to Prague. When Ehrenburg brought Tsvetaeva the news her husband was still alive, she immediately made the decision to join him. There followed a long period of exile, in Prague and in Paris, where she saw her early fame vanish. Her most intense erotic experience was a brief love affair with Konstantin Rodzevich in Prague and she records the end of their love in ‘Poem of the Mountain' and ‘Poem of the End'. Afterwards, with her husband, she had a son, Georgy, nicknamed Moor, on whom she lavished all her affection. In Paris, her daughter Alya became much closer to her father and, as a convinced Communist, chose to return to Russia. When Efron was exposed as a Soviet agent in 1937, the NKVD hastily took him back to Russia. Tsvetaeva knew nothing of his activities as a spy but she was ostracised by the Russian émigré community in Paris nevertheless. Tsvetaeva followed Efron back to Russia with Moor in 1939. Alya was arrested only months after Tsvetaeva's return and Efron – incriminated by Alya under torture – a month later. Desolate, Tsvetaeva went to Moscow to look for old friends but most were afraid to meet her. When the Germans invaded Russia, Tsvetaeva took Georgy and herself to Yelabuga on the River Kama, close to Chistopol where the Writers' Union evacuated its members. In her loneliness, and after a quarrel with Moor, Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941.